Oh, They'll Get in Line

 

I can recall finally understanding what "elitism" meant to anti-intellectual MAGAs, and basically, it was them being told they were wrong or cruel and being made to feel bad by...anybody. It wasn't about class or education status--it was the idea that someone out there was gonna tell you you wasn't exactly as good as them. So there! 

So, in the H-1B visa debate that is roiling TrumpWorld, Vivek Ramaswamy seems to have been part of the mild fracas happening on X by letting US (White) Americans know they culturally weren't producing well qualified tech job applicants because they didn't rise and grind the way Asian kids do. Too many jocks and prom queens and peaking in high school. MAGA was fine with "pull your pants up and take care of your kids" lectures directed at Black Americans, but if you tell them that their four touchdowns in a single game for Polk High School doesn't qualify them for more than selling shoes, they are going to get Big Mad. 

And we already know where white supremacist Laura Loomer was on this one:

Liar's Polka

 

Host: At the end of the book you say, the very first thing you would do if you got to the WH that was different from Biden, is you would make sure Biden's dog was nowhere on the grounds. Commander say hello to cricket. Are you trying to look tough? pic.twitter.com/oAlQBHDCmd

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 5, 2024

"Liar's Polka", not "Liar's Poker" because this woman is moving her feet all over the place but doesn't have a lick of an idea how to play a game. She doesn't just kill her own dogs, but wants to kill Biden's dog? (Hint: A potential Trump VP candidate?)

That is not a Biden problem, that is very much a Kristi Noem problem. She is very tough on livestock and her imagined conversations with world leaders, but she is as dumb as her foot and a half of natural hair extensions and her prime-time makeover. 

So here is how dumb Noem wants to be--she supposedly read the galleys of her ghostwritten political memoir, and even voiced the audio book, but is only just now realizing she never met Kim Jong Un and that's a problem. Somehow someone else's problem. She says she met other world leaders, but she isn't talking about that because...I dunno. 

Does Dean Phillips Have a Path?

 

Andrew Yang tantalizes us with this question: Does Dean Phillips have a path to the Democratic nomination?  The answer is something like, Dean Phillips plays hockey and will feel familiar to people in Michigan. I don't know what that has to do with politics. Andrew Yang doesn't know what that has to do with politics. Andrew Yang doesn't get politics, and I don't think Dean Phillips does either. Dean Phillips is carbon-based and bilaterally symmetrical. It feels familiar. Is that something? 

Being 51 years old doesn't qualify you for president. I mean, it's older than the requirement to be at least 35 years of age. I'm 51. Dean Phillips, Andrew Yang, Nikki Haley, Beto O'Rourke, and all the members of Green Day are around the same age. So's Elon Musk. The idea that politics is about demographics and branding feels really business school and dumb. So are the packaging ideas:  I do a sport, so I'm relatable. I wear a vest. I have a haircut. I look presidential. 

The lesson of New Hampshire should be--Dean Phillips doesn't have a path, because there were no delegates to be awarded there but 1) $5 million got spent on him and 2) a mostly grassroots write-in campaign said "drop out Dean" and he got hammered and he isn't dropping out. Clue-having he isn't.

Know Your Class War: Immigration and The People Problem

 

I made what I thought was a kind of anodyne comment on Twitter about how immigrants were demonized for stealing jobs when that wasn't what they did at all: if they were hired for a job, showed up and did the job and got paid for it, they weren't stealing a job, they were working a job. To me, this was just sense. I've said it before right here. Anyway, however I said it, it was assumed I did not know that employers intentionally employed undocumented workers because they lived in fear of being deported and therefore were exploited and damn, I know.   It's hard not to be aware of it. 

The point I was trying to make is, the immigrants aren't bodying people out of kitchens and off assembly-lines and taking over retail warehouses and starting to collect paychecks by doing nothing at all. They aren't stealing jobs--employers are giving them jobs. Are they legally doing so? Yeah, if they are not checking if they have a right to work, that's illegal. If they are paying them under the table, they know that's wrong. So why are we going to get spun up over undocumented workers trying to feed, clothe, and house themselves over whether employers are complying with the law? 

Immigrants aren't stealing jobs. They might have an impact on local wages and employer choices, but that isn't on them. They are taking available jobs because they have to eat.  And if you wanted better local wages and better watchdogs over labor issues--you could most certainly vote for pro-labor political candidates and push for labor issues wherever and whenever you could. You should support living wage laws and support strengthening regulatory leverage over abusive employers. Immigrants are just trying to live. 

The second thing I want to address isn't the "stealing people's jobs" thing, but the dehumanizing thing. I might not be a labor expert any more than I am a lawyer or a historian, but when people start talking about other people as a "problem" or as a "question" and start talking about transporting them to tent cities, or camps, or ghettos, or reservations, or just thinking "relocating" is the answer to how to ever deal with people--you aren't thinking about people as people, but as some kind of unwanted furniture. That shit is fascism. 

I get that people feel entitled to their resentment over the idea that marginalized people occasionally appear to make out from certain insufficiencies in our capitalist moral landscape. But I am fucking harrowed by the penalties human beings face for trying to come here and build a better world for themselves by trusting monsters. How desperate does one have to be to be positioned to sit and be fried alive? 

People are not the problem. Our willingness to not see people as people, but as units of labor are. Or as political pawns and props, or as useful targets of resentment-fueled propaganda. Immigration, like resolving the homeless crisis or any other thing where people are deprived of resources, can be an unlocked asset by a wealthy country figuring out where the resources are. We are mean and we suck as people because we don't focus on doing stuff like that. We don't see people as people and useful in their own right and would throw them away rather than invest in their having the lives they should that let them maximize the good they can give in return. 

Anyway, that's my $.02. 

 

"Not Many People Know it...."

 

TN GOP state senator uses Hitler as an example of how people can make something of themselves after being homeless.

This is absurd. pic.twitter.com/bhyTWIz6C1

— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) April 14, 2022

There was a time when I would wonder if this kind of nut-picking was fair. Can you really point to what some state legislator dumbass says and then somehow judge the whole GOP because of it? And as I looked around me, I eventually decided yes. Yes, I absolutely should make the connection. When someone takes a look at the life story of Adolf Hitler, the takeaway should not actually be that, say what you will about the man, he was a real go-getter. (And a terrific dancer!) 

There is a real problem when a party regularly demonstrates that they don't actually see the problem with Hitler comparisons because, well...they don't see the problem. They are deliberately not seeing the problem.  And if Republicans wonder where folks get the idea from that they are represented by people like Patrick Little or Arthur Jones or Paul Nehlen, or...you get the picture. 

This was a gaffe. They guy made an unfortunate positive reference to Hitler, in regards to a bill that punishes people who have no homes for camping in public spaces. (I rankle at the term "camping"--it's called "living". People exist with bodies that have to go somewhere. They are living in those bodies in those places because shelters are for whatever reason not a possibility for them. But it isn't a pastime for them and they don't have a home to otherwise go be in. 

Why am I pointing this out? The idea that vagrancy is a choice and should be punished is to classify the people as the problem. There is a long history of the in the US and elsewhere--but it certainly isn't helpful. And absent good options, it can lead to people deciding where "undesirable people" or "asocials" need to go. 

I worry about that. Republicans are very good at labelling people as the problem. And they are even re-locating people they consider a problem. Stupid, dangerous stunts today--but with a kernel of something very dangerous in them that makes me wonder what we will see from them in the future. The party of "Don't say Gay" and "Where's your Papers?" feels like they aren't making mistakes when stuff like this pops out, just letting a mask slip/ 

Just Admit You Didn't Want To

 

Sen. Joe Manchin III on Sunday said that he could not vote to proceed on Democrats’ roughly $2 trillion spending package, dealing a potentially fatal political blow to the final piece of President Biden’s economic agenda. https://t.co/6MFbuz3w7L

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 19, 2021

"I can't do it." Huh. "I tried everything humanly possible." Hah. "I can't get there...this is a no."

Sure. I didn't see any gag on Sen. Manchin's mouth or leg irons on his legs preventing him. I'm not aware of any spell he was under that might have turned him into a toad if he voted for the bill. The thing he couldn't do was look his good lobbyist friends and his good fundraising friends in the eye and say, "I'm just going to do something that benefits my constituents." 

It would have been entirely humanly possible. He didn't want to do it. Now, there is some part of me that would love if three Christmas ghosts got on his case about this to change his mind in a Dickensian heart-warmer, but I don't think I see it. But if he didn't want to, and wasn't ever going to want to, he could have said so then, and he could admit it now. 

UPDATE:  How is he supposed to eeexxxxxpppllliaaainn it to West Virginia?

But sure, Joe Manchin is just representing his constituents. Got it. pic.twitter.com/xteA0uLjy0

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) December 19, 2021

Um. I don't know. Tell them they are right and it is good? He's been ridiculous this whole time.

UPDATE:  Wow. The message from the White House comes about as close to calling a member of the Presiden'ts own party a damn liar as they professionally could. 

Mayday, Mayday

The photo on the left was an example of Nazi irony: the Nazis expected work without freedom, unless you consider death a kind of freedom. The photo on the right (from a protest against state COVID-19 restrictions in Illinois) seems to be intended, in one light, in a non-ironic way: Having the choice to work (to open businesses) is freedom. But there is also an ironic way of looking at it: other people's labor make the protester free. An open hair salon means someone else works on a person's hair, a restaurant means someone else prepares a meal and deals with the dirty dishes.

These protests are about other people's labor, and other people's exposure to a disease that can be deadly. Being International Workers' Day, it's a good time to point out that loosening restrictions doesn't make many workers free: it gives them the choice of working and being exposed to a disease that can kill, or not working and being unable to collect any kind of benefits--giving them the likelihood of sickness on one end, food insecurity and the threat of homelessness on the other. "Opening the state" sounds like freedom, but it means businesses are forced to open, make arrangements for social distancing at their place of business (which might mean costly alterations) and trying to smartly schedule staffing--and may still not translate into adequate custom to justify the overhead--because most people are still scared to do commerce as usual (and rightly so!).

The paradigm is one in which retail service workers or public transit workers can become ill because of other people's personal decisions. These people are just trying to put food on the table and live their lives, and the freedom to serve other people so that they can pay their bills shouldn't equal death for them.

That is *Not* Staying in Vegas, You Guys

'We've had viruses for years... I want the hotel rooms open' — The mayor of Las Vegas gave this unbelievably alarming interview to Anderson Cooper pic.twitter.com/IW774WIlFJ

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) April 23, 2020

There is so much going on in this video that you really have to take a look at the whole thing. The mayor of Las Vegas, Carolyn Goodman, doesn't seem very well-informed, she's willing to gamble (see what I did there?) that business-owners will figure out how to take precautions to ensure social distancing on their own, she assumes that for some reason, the person-to-person transmission of the virus works differently in China than it would in Las Vegas, and seems out-of-touch and glib about the whole thing.

From offering her city as a control group (note to Mayor Goodman: offering oneself as tribute in the Hunger Games was heroic, offering up the fate of potentially thousands of people not just in your city but from everywhere visitors may hail from is...very much not) to scoffing at the idea she would spend time every night in a casino herself ("I have a family!", as if the people who work in the casinos all hatched out of little plastic eggs or something), she displays a shocking unfitness for understanding that other people have valid safety concerns and that those concerns matter. There's no consideration about what this means for those business' potential liability for becoming a "petri dish" or what that might mean for the longer-term health of the local economy.

What is also stunning, though, I think, is that while she voices this attitude pretty openly, the difference between her and other folks pushing to open up for business is really just that--she said it out loud.

Waste of Money?

“Oligarch”
Our office in Youngstown, OH

America deserves better. pic.twitter.com/zDdv2CZzVs

— Team Bloomberg (@Mike2020) February 24, 2020

This poor defenseless board outside of a Bloomberg campaign office was quite obviously vandalized by an utter hooligan who wanted a surface that would be large enough to spell out the word "oligarch", but would be portable and not actually damage the property, because you know. Anarchists always respect landlords and shit. There's more where that came from. Just ugly Post-its of menace and cliché. It's really great street-view theater. Somehow, though, it just doesn't feel....like things that are actually happening.

Yeah. It doesn't feel like things that are real. Like take the supporters who are paid to say nice things about the former mayor of NYC.

A look inside the strategy — based on documents reviewed by The Times, interviews with five of these organizers and an examination of the operation’s social media output — shows that many have been using accounts created within the last month for their Twitter posts. At least two had openly posted in support of other candidates. And unlike the high-profile influencers the campaign recently hired to create viral memes, the vast majority of these organizers have modest personal audiences. On Twitter, many have fewer than 20 followers.

Rather than create their own content, organizers often use the exact text, images and links provided to them by the campaign. The result has been a stiff outpouring of tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts with little to no engagement and sometimes half-hearted text messages. Some organizers were so robotic in their tweeting, Twitter suspended their accounts Friday evening after The Times inquired about whether their behavior complied with the platform’s rules on spam and manipulation.

That's pretty lackluster. What else is the social media strategy up to?

Well, if you said posting mildly homophobic and hacky Tweets under the "Team Bloomberg" handle and then deleting them because they really sucked, that would get you an exploding cigar.

Wow. That was almost as bad as the time the campaign posted an obviously doctored video of the debate to create a "Mike Drop" incident (see what I did there?) that never happened after their candidate got notoriously roasted.

All of this effort. All of this money spent. What is it for? Take these dumb billboards, please!

There are internment camps for migrant children and they want to talk about burnt steak? At least be Henny Youngman-level interesting. "Donald Trump is so broke he only buys used gum!" "When Donald Trump sits around the White House, he really sits around the White House!" "Donald Trump may cheat at golf, but at least he's well known for his short putts." (But again, what does "He's fat and he dresses funny" things do for you? They show elitist values and alienate regular people! Not rocket surgery!)

The money spent during this campaign just makes me so mad. It could power up so many congressional races. It could fix immediate real-people needs. But it looks like clowning.

Trump's Seven Words

The Trump administration reportedly wants 7 words and phrases banned from some official documents at the @CDCgov https://t.co/lMA4FhQuhl pic.twitter.com/x8MNoNs1DV

— Business Insider (@businessinsider) December 16, 2017

In 2017, I miss George Carlin because he was cynical and sharp and would have told you he foresaw all this present-day bullshit, because there's a club, and honeys, you were never in it. But I will say I do not like the Trump Administration deciding that there are seven words that the CDC should consider forbidden.

Forbidden words? Huh. I guess Winston Smith could probably explain part of why, but let me do my bit:

"Vulnerable". This word implies persons in a precarious situation and in need. The Trump state does not seem to want to recognize human problems or needs as anything they prefer to address. People can be vulnerable to crime, food scarcity, lack of jobs, discrimination, inequalities in the deliverance of promised goods and services from the state, such as education, health services and housing. Not understanding these people as "vulnerable" is an attempt to make us not sympathize with these--the least among us. My catechism an age ago said that whatever you do to these you do to the Lord. Trump will dangle Johnson Amendment bullcrap in front of evangelicals, but he will never pretend he cares for "the least of us". Our vulnerable asses need to sack up.

"Entitlement": An entitlement is a paid benefit for one's investment, and denying that entitlements are a thing is denying that since FDR and LBJ, we have been paying for benefits we surely should have access to. Social Security and Medicare are things working people pay for all the time. We are "entitled" to those benefits.

"Diversity" : I grew up in Philadelphia, which is a very diverse major US city. I have always known people who were racial minorities, and had friends who were. I feel like there is a benefit in understanding that people have different backgrounds and experiences, and trying to learn from them, is innately beneficial and ignoring diversity is a kind of tunnel vision.

"Transgender" : Talk about trying to "disappear people"--not using a reference to a class of people is a form of erasure. Trans people will continue to exist because of their identity, but "on paper", the Trump Administration prefers not to talk about these folks. This marginalizing quality is sheer bigotry and ugliness in action. Thinking about a caution to avoid using the term "transgender" reminds me that there is a transgender ban proposed by the Trump Administration, aimed at hounding out trans service members even though there is nothing to indicate that trans people are poor soldiers or sailors or air personnel. It is the height of stupidity to think avoiding a word will make an entire class of people disappear.

"Fetus": The pro-life contingent is probably behind the desire to see the word "fetus" get elbowed out in favor of terms like "unborn child". While denying a word like "transgender" is aimed at denying a class of people their identity, the banning of the term "fetus" seems bent on discovering ways not to erase, but to invent, a class of not yet people into persons. A 20 week gestational human fetus is not treated as a person in the sense of having opinions and making choices about outcomes.

And this is how is should be, because fetuses have no human experience, memories, etc, and are only provisionally human in the sense that someone wants to make a person of them, someday. And if one physically hosting them does not?

"Evidence-based" : I feel like back-handing evidence, which is the basis of science, is a definite indicator of bad will--these SOBS have no intention to recognize scientific data that matters. They will roll back regulations without any study as to the outward harm done. They think looking too strongly at outcomes is a kind of bias (because they know their own ideas never work.)

"Science-based": Again, facts seem to have a liberal bias, so maybe qualitative or quantitative values for looking at the world seem liberal-biased, because they show that hard facts aren't changed by messaging or bribes.

About That Senate Tax Reform Vote

I went to bed just before the vote was announced, and just after noting that that there might be nekkid Rep. Farenthold selfies in the world, and I see a kind of connection, one is always just minutes away from seeing the unattractive side of a Republican.  The bill was over four hundred pages, thrown together with no hearings, addenda in the margins, and opinions from tax experts based on what was known about the outline of the bill that it really did not constitute a tax cut for the folks who could use a break--it gave a tremendous tax break to the wealthy. It also blows up the deficit. Exactly one Republican cared enough about the deficit to bow out--retiring Senator Bob Corker. But he still isn't a hero, because he voted to let this shambles of a bill get on the floor. (Sure, McConnell would have sent it out over the committees' heads, but then it just could have been on him.)

Where was the Senator McCain who stood up against the screwing of the ACA? Where was Senator Flake, who talked with such intensity about how politics had changed? Neither of them are seeing another battle for their seats--but they still had no trouble with this bill, even though, McCain, notably, had made quite familiar reservations known about a tax cut bill some time ago, but apparently has learned to love fiscal irresponsibility. 

Senator Flake sold his vote on tax deformation over a handful of magic beans called being part of a conversation on DACA. I already forget what kind of IOU printed on toilet paper Senator Collins got for her vote. 

There are no heroes on that side. Now, this doesn't mean this income-inequality-boosting bullshit bill becomes a law just yet--they still have to hash out the final deal against the House bill, and there is more than a little difference between them. But they are going to pass something to make up for not having passed anything of any great importance this year, and the end product will most definitely suck.

I trust Democrats should be working on how to run in 2018 and beyond based on this bullshit right here--but this is not even the first time Republicans were exactly like this. But here's a reminder for today and the foreseeable future--they are exactly like this. 

It's a Clearly a Budget. It's got Lots of Numbers in it.*

"We stand by the numbers," Trump budget director says of $2,000,000,000,000 error that uses same money twice. https://t.co/iSU10e0wy3 pic.twitter.com/jeIdJlFumX

— NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) May 24, 2017

You can say a lot of terrible things about the Trump budget, but the bottom line is: They (Trump and Ryan and Mulvaney--oh, lots of folks) don't care. Is it based on a mathematical error? They don't care. Is it going to cut Social Security and Medicaid? They don't care. Is it actually going to add to the debt because they can't do math and Trump doesn't hire the best people? Is it sheer misery encoded in a document that nickel-and-dimes away basic decency?

Pfft!

They don't care! And they meant to do it like that. So there!

*Title courtesy of President George W. Bush.

He's Not Even That Successful A Businessman

One of the important things the recent tax record revelation should remind us of is this--Trump is not actually a particularly successful businessman. He talks a good game, but he built his business on the back of a wealthy father--who not just left him a fortune, but used his fortune to prop him up when he needed it. But the reality is, Trump has a bad attention span, and has tried and failed at all kinds of things. His is not an actual success story, but rather a story about how privilege saves the ass of the protected and mediocre.

It's a propped-up success story, some part self-promotion, and some part OPM. Like loans from Deutsche Bank. We've made a lot of noise over the degree to which he could be baited with a Tweet, but it is also true he could be blackmailed with his outstanding notes. This is a leveraged individual, and his independence is held liable because he is personally extended. There is nothing equivalent to his various forms of financial dirt in Clinton's history. His level of systemic financial abuse seems to me quite rare--his pattern of non-payment and renegotiation suggest he should have been able to be profitable--but the tale of the tape kind of implies he behaves abusively in the courts and seeks assorted name-leases because he is cash poor and debt-ridden.

And you know what? I don't think running the hell for president to highlight these failures actually has helped him any. Making him basically the King of Bad Decisions. I hope that idea sticks a little. Because knowing is more than half the battle.

Six Delegates of Separation

In other primary news, Senator Bernie Sanders won the Indiana primary, which, in the apportioned delegate selection, means he got 43 delegates to her 37. This is significant, because I feel like people aren't paying attention to the delegate math. This was an open primary, so Sanders doing just a bit better was not too surprising.

Hillary Clinton needs 2,383 altogether to secure the nomination. She is still closer to securing the nomination altogether.

Donald Trump has basically secured the nomination of his party already and his candidacy is a dumpster fire.

I know there are people who feel like they should flush a vote for "Unicorn" down the old porcelain ballot box in the hopes that it will telegraph to the democracy gods that they have once again fucked up. But I believe that the old gods are dead and there is only math. I like math. I don't like Donald Trump.

Hillary Clinton believes in climate change, equal rights for women, equal rights for LGBT people, and not pillaging the daylights out of the working class to feed Mammon. I think interventionism deserves all the second thoughts in the world and that the 1% probably deserves a trip to the woodshed. But I will believe that Hillary Clinton turns the world on with a smile if it means we don't get Donald Trump, because in the universe where he wins I see more war and more party favors for the 1%ers on the USS Fuckthepoors. I see a future where racial inequality is preserved or widened, and a sensible path regarding immigration is demogogued away.

In the Clinton universe, her coattails for Congress and her SCOTUS choices minimize the hell out of the damage.

You all do you, of course. I'm just making a vague point about math.

I can think of a cure for "Affluenza"

This is how far #Affluenza teen #EthanCouch went to avoid jail time after killing 4 people https://t.co/ISYisl9rao pic.twitter.com/w5E0KGwh4V

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) December 18, 2015

There's nothing that grates on me like the idea that being privileged meant that this kid's worldview was so screwed-up that he couldn't discern right from wrong, and deserved to get a lighter sentence. If what was ailing the poor little rich boy's mindset was "affluenza", then wouldn't a dose of reality to correct his worldview have done him far more good?

The belief that wealth grants one entitlements beyond the law is something that should be nipped in the bud, before it flowers into further pathology. The results can be far-reaching when allowed to mature.  Yet our legal system puts away more broke people than it does rich folks. Interesting.

Donald Trump and the Classy Divide

There is a moment where, if you are at all a careful person, when you understand that "class" is often used as a substitute for "dignity". Or "honor". Donald Trump constitutes, if "class" is determined as a measure of wealth, by far one of America's classiest people. He is the representative of the 1%. If not the .01%. In the above picture, for those who can't view images, he is signing the upper chest area of a middle-aged woman because why not? And someone behind her is brandishing a copy of Trump's latest book Crippled America. (We do not generally refer to disabled persons as "crippled" anymore, so his use for that description of this country is pretty much repellent to thinking folks, as well.)

Today, Trump made a speech to Republican Jewish people that should have been a bissel alarming, because he kind of used all the stereotypes. Because he thinks Jewish people are all about money and the negotiating and the haggle and the deal.  That was pretty transparent.

But why wouldn't he stereotype in the laziest way? After all, he has insulted Asians, women, black people, disabled people, immigrants but especially Mexican immigrants.

He is so good at declaring various people "losers". I begin to wonder how he ever finds any of us to be winners. But in the meanwhile--he is an actual lowbrow? I mean,  money can't pave his actual cognitive lacks with gold, platinum, or even borrowed merit. Who signs the upper tit? Where is this good optics?

Know Your Class War: Middle-Aged White Americans

Sometimes, trawling for knowledge in the Internets becomes distinctively scary when you realize that the information you are searching for probably relates to yourself a lot. A recent study has found a dramatic increase in deaths among middle-aged white folks in recent years. I happen to be middle-aged white folks. This made me really all kinds of concerned--am I gonna die like right now? Because I have such a to-do list it's...probably contributing to my ultimate demise.

I have reasons for thinking this related to the class war--the middle class is eroding, and a lot of middle class people are a major purchase away from being broke or in debt, or a major health crisis away from being poor. When people like Ben Carson or Tom Cotton opine about how poor folks, disabled or lazy folks or people lulled by political correctness turn to addiction, I feel disturbed by how out of touch they really are. 

Berlin 1989--Freedom Concert

I thought a musical interlude might be rather nice. Please enjoy.

I'm on Team Gwyneth Tried.

A lot of articles regarding Gwyneth Paltrow's attempt at the SNAP challenge are being pretty snarky about her quest only lasting about four days. But I want to go ahead and agree with this article that starts out Team Gwyneth--because she tried.

Ok. She comes from successful people and has been food-privileged her whole life. I don't think we need to stand and wonder about how she didn't know beforehand how difficult it was to feed oneself on the cheap--she has simply never had to do it. It's one thing to know what you know--and (I know this is an awkward way of saying it) it's really hard to know what you don't know. Unless you grew up knowing from dollar stores, discount bins, the brilliance of cheap meat slow-cooked and used as flavoring, and the necessity of eating lots and lots of noodles, where exactly do you go to find this out? Because some of us learned from our mothers and grandmothers--how to turn $3-4 worth of chicken thighs and a smattering of cabinet staples into meat you could do for dinner one night and sandwiches a time or two later, or why the basis of casseroles and hotdish all over the country begin from essentially, macaroni and cheese. That cookbook is word-of-mouth, not necessarily available at any store.

She didn't know. She has been about healthy eating and didn't know whole food eating is costly. Cheap food is prepared foods sometimes, and also pretty starchy, salty, and sugary. She wouldn't have known to compromise.

Know Your Class War: The Curse of the (Water) Drinking Class

Human bodies are something like 60-70 percent water.  We need it to live. It's a basic component of our survival, and access to proper water and sewerage systems is credited with the expansion of the human lifespan in the 20th century, or in any event, we should understand that poor sanitation and water access are not conducive to life--full stop.

Which is why I see water usage as a definite class war issue--for example, did you know that while Detroit is cutting off water to poorer citizens who can not pay their bills--business that are skating on their water bills are spared?

I find that damn interesting.

Not unlike the ability of Duke Energy to walk away from its responsibility to the people of North Carolina whose water was fouled, or the bloody paltry fine that Freedom Industries paid for fouling the water of West Virginia--it seems like a real double-standard exists when it comes to who we think should have use of water, as if it were a privilege or a luxury, and not a right for the survival of beings that depend upon it.

This is why the draining of aquifers in the mid-and southwest for use in farming and fracking and whatever else even as droughts are raging doesn't really shock me. Water is seen, not as essential to life, but as a commodity having a price tag. And if you can't afford the price, well, you can be thirsty. (Now, I'm not saying food production isn't essential--but let's be honest, there is a lot to be said for smaller-scale sustainable practices and more reliance on local food sourcing. Modern farming processes can spoil and waste tons of water. )

Since water is actually essential to human life, does that mean life is viewed as a privilege, not a right?  I do sorely wonder.